WIN Spring 2015

The year was 1978. Connie Blitt had come to New York after college, looking to find others with a passion for social change. She joined the staff of WIN, where she became immersed in the issues of the day. Her life changed forever when a call came in to the WIN office: Ninety-year-old peace activist…

Excerpted from “It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood” (O/R Books, 2014) In 2005, I helped to establish Witness Against Torture when 25 of us flew to Cuba with the hope of gaining access to Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. naval base where more than 700 men, called…

Conversations are a crucial component of WRL work, conversations about specific nonviolent strategies, about how racism and sexism affect our decisions (sometimes when we don’t realize it), even lively discussions about brewing beer or whether the anarchists or the socialists will win a WRL softball game. So it seemed singularly appropriate for the WRL anniversary…

2015 needs WIN. Not just this year, not just the very magazine you hold in your hands (or are reading online). Our overall moment in history, in the adolescence of the 21st century, needs the politics of revolutionary nonviolence. That politics is proclaimed on the cover of this unique publication, often described within its pages,…

AN INTERVIEW WITH LINDA THURSTON You have a long history of working not just for political prisoners, but for the rights and freedom of prisoners in general, as well as for prison abolition. What motivated you to get involved in this work? Linda Thurston: In the very beginning it was extremely personal. My first memory…

The July-August 2001 Nonviolent Activist asked “What makes an action nonviolent?” The question had acquired urgency among peace and justice activists in the wake of the November 1999 massive protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. I picked this issue to review because Iíd wished that discussion had gone on longer and gotten deeper,…

I started reading WIN in 1976. A roommate subscribed while I was living in Washington, DC, and I was captivated by the then weekly magazine as it chronicled the Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice and the beginnings of nonviolent direct action against nuclear power. I soon had my own subscription and a WRL…

How can I choose one issue to call a favorite? Easy. Select one on a subject that continues to obsess me. It happens that I still have a copy of the January-February 1994 Nonviolent Activist (edited by Sharon Seidenstein and designed by Rick Bickhart) stuck in an old folder on the bottom shelf of my…

In 1984, WRL hired me to be the founding editor of The Nonviolent Activist. In retrospect, the inaugural issue that appeared in December was a reflection of the state of WRL at the time — and its publication was an important moment in my own life. “Founding editor” sounds much more significant than it actually…

The Crisis, the Calling, the Strategy, and the Horizon By Ecosocialist Horizons This document emerged from an invitation to discussion put forward by Ecosocialist Horizons at the first Pan-African conference on nonviolence in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2014, where delegates and representatives from 34 African countries and over 50 countries from every continent…

Here we are in the 21st century where social relations are compromised. We live in states of exclusions from one another and refrain from attesting to states of ignorance that lead to violence. It is complicity that leaves wounds one can barely count. How do we come to know intellect, language skills, skin color, sexual…

To celebrate its tenth anniversary in 1976, WIN re-published a range of articles from its earliest years. Editor Mark (now Markley) Morris chose to focus mostly on the first two years both for space considerations and to represent the beginnings of both the magazine itself and the peace movement it represented. Included are many reviews…

Here’s what I think when I remember the 200th issue of WIN magazine: We were right. It is the conventional wisdom of many in today’s popular culture that the antiwar hippie movement was a monumental failure. It was, they say, the precursor to the selfishness of the “Me Decade” that followed. They are wrong. I…

I was asked for this final issue of WIN to comment on the Gay Liberation issue of 1969, which had an article by Paul Goodman and a long one by me (“Notes for a more coherent article”). The irony is that I cannot claim to have been an activist in the Gay Liberation movement, yet…

WIN first appeared January 15, 1966. It was published by the New York Workshop in Nonviolence, sponsored by both Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) and War Resisters League. The timing was fortuitous. WIN appeared as the United States was entering years of tumult. This rapidly changing world gave WIN a variety of opportunities and challenges,…

As War Resisters League organizers, and as people committing our lives to challenging militarism, we don’t often see moments when our work comes together and people power is stronger than people in power. But a lot came together last September 5, when for once we could truly feel that people power strength. It was a…